Julia Gillard 'small breasts' menu at fundraiser causes Australia row

Gender has again taken center stage in Australia’s bitter and drawn-out election campaign after a menu at an opposition fundraiser featured a series of sexually derogatory names for dishes based on Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

The menu, posted on Twitter by a journalist, was from a fundraiser for Mal Brough, a minister in former Prime Minister John Howard’s government who is seeking to return to parliament after losing his seat in 2007.

One of the dishes was described as “Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box.”

Opposition leader Tony Abbott was forced to distance himself from the menu and the fundraiser, but faced calls to drop Brough as an election candidate.

“I condemn it, as Mal Brough has,” Abbott told journalists today. “I think we should all be bigger and better than that. Whether it is a tacky scatological menu out the front of a Liberal Party event, whether it is squalid jokes told at union conference dinners with ministers present.”

The wording on the menu was “grossly offensive,” Gillard told reporters. “This is Tony Abbott’s Liberals, this is what they’re like,” she said. “We’d see this lack of respect for women littered throughout all of his government policy documents.”

The latest sexism controversy exploded onto the Australian political stage after the opposition had accused Gillard of politicizing abortion.

Gillard was stoking a “false gender war” by saying a defeat for her minority Labor government in the Sept. 14 poll would see abortion become a political plaything for male politicians, the Liberal-National opposition said.

“It reminds me a bit of a Punch and Judy show,” Eva Cox, founder of the Women’s Economic Think Tank and author of “Leading Women,” told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “Gillard knocks down Abbott, Abbott knocks down Gillard.”

The gender debate in Australia has simmered for months, with Gillard branding Abbott a misogynist and sexist, while contending with opposition supporters’ taunts that she’s childless and doesn’t understand family life. The issue erupted as Gillard contends with renewed speculation she will be challenged for the Labor leadership as polls show her government is on track for a landslide defeat.

Gillard, at a fundraiser yesterday, said the elections will be a “decision about whether, once again, we will banish women’s voices from our political life.”

“We don’t want to live in an Australia where abortion again becomes the political plaything of men who think they know better,” said Gillard, who has previously described the ballot as a contest between “a strong feisty woman” and a “policy- weak man.”

The abortion comments were a “crude political ploy” from Gillard, Deputy Opposition leader Julie Bishop told ABC radio today.

“She’s clearly trying to distract attention from her own self-inflicted political woes,” Bishop said. “We would expect a PM to seek to unite the country, not divide it through some false gender war.”

Gillard’s comments were also challenged by women’s groups, before the debate switched to sexism within the coalition’s ranks.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, campaigning in marginal Labor seats in western Sydney amid speculation he is seeking to return to the Labor leadership, said Brough “should be doing more than apologizing.” “Mr. Brough should be taking a long, hard look at himself because this sort of behavior is not appropriate in the 21st century,” he told reporters.

Brough’s office said it would release a statement later today.

Abortion is legal in Australia, though guidelines for when termination may take place vary between states. Bishop reiterated today the coalition would not make any changes to abortion laws if it wins government.

Abbott, 55, said in a speech in March 2004, when he was health minister, that abortion has been “reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience” and is “a national tragedy.”

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He has distanced himself from those comments, saying in March he accepted “absolutely” that for any woman facing an unexpected pregnancy “the choices are tough.”

Gillard, 51, faced down her second Labor leadership vote in a year in March, winning uncontested. Labor hasn’t led in opinion polls for more than 18 months and was 16 percentage points behind the opposition on a two-party preferred basis in a Newspoll published in the Australian newspaper on June 4.

Parliament will sit for a final two weeks starting June 17, a danger zone for Gillard when her Labor colleagues will all be in Canberra, enabling a snap challenge.

Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten, a party powerbroker, reiterated his backing for the prime minister.

“I continue to support her,” he told reporters today. Responding to a question on whether she would lead Labor to the next election, Shorten said “yes, I believe so.”